Volume I Part 25 (1/2)
Representations of this kind are coh in the royal tombs of Thebes It will suffice if we notice those which are still to be seen in the sepulchre of Rameses III, in the series of s scene which we take fro 183), these pictures have, beyond a doubt, the sa and value as those in the nificance is only secondary Ideas had progressed to soeneral arrangement and in the details of its ornaave expression to the new, more philosophical, and more moral conception which had come to overlie the primitive beliefs
The first conception was that of the double, inhabiting the tomb, and kept alive in it by sacrifice and prayer But in tiyptians would appear to have realized that the double was not the only thing that remained after the death of a human unit Their powers of apprehension were quickened, in all probability, by that high ive evidence
Good or bad, every man had a double, the continuance and prosperity of which depended in no way upon his merits or demerits Unless the just and the unjust were to co This so in the interior of the to and difficult subterranean journey--in i which it had to undergo certain tests and penances Froe withthe few short years passed by it on earth and in coed It had to appear before the tribunal of Osiris-Khent-Aht, around whose seat the forty-two members of the infernal jury were assembled[255]
[255] This belief in the appearance of the dead before Osiris and his assessors gave rise to one of the ypt The scene in question is figured upon many of the tombs visited by the Greek travellers, and in many of the illustrated papyri which were unrolled for their gratification In the fragments of some funerary inscription or of some of these manuscripts, hastily translated for the priests, they found frequent allusions to this act of trial and judgreatly struck by the iyptians to the sentence of this tribunal, but, always in a hurry, and soent, they do not seeoman, without whom they could not stir from the frontier, told thees in question were living men, and their tribunal an earthly one, and that they were charged to decide whether sepulture should be granted to the dead or not One of the early travellers, we do not knohich, gave currency to this belief, and we kno it has served as the foundation for , from the ti either in the figured monuments or in the written texts which hints at the existence of such a custoyptologists have been agreed upon this point Every Egyptian was placed in a sepulchre befitting his station and fortune; his relations and friends had to ask no permission before they placed hiht up for judgust tribunal
[Illustration: FIG 183--Hunting scene upon a tomb at Gournah
(Champollion, pl 171)]
There, before the ”Lords of truth and justice,” the soul had to plead its cause, and there it had to repeat, with an amount of assurance and success which would depend upon its conduct in the light, that negative confession which we read in chapter cxxv of the ”_Book of the Dead_,” which contains an epitoes were not guided solely by the testihed its actions in a pair of scales and gave judgged, was delivered to stor, underwent a second death, the death of annihilation The just soul, on the other hand, had to conquer in many a combat before it was ad its transit across the infernal regions, hideous for up before it and did their best to arrest its progress by terrifying threats Thanks to the help of Osiris and of other soul-protecting Gods, such as Anubis, it triumphed in the end over all obstacles, and, as the sun reappears eachupon the eastern horizon, it arrived surely at last at those celestial dwellings where it becaives a translation of it into French in his _Histoire Ancienne_, pp 44 and 45
[257] This weighing of the actions of the deceased was represented in the illustrated specimens of the _Ritual of the Dead_ and upon the walls of the toyptian motives which were sprinkled by the Phnicians over the whole basin of the Mediterranean
Co under the eyes of the Greeks, it was inations into that ????stas?a, or _weighing of souls_, which we find in the Iliad (xxii 208-212), where success in a combat between two heroes depends upon the result of that operation (See ALFRED MAURY, _Revue archeologique_, 1844, pp 235-249, 291-307; 1845, pp 707-717, and DE WITTE, _ibidem_, 1844, pp 647-656)
[Illustration: FIG 184--The weighing of actions (From an illustrated _Ritual of the Dead_ in the British Museuination spared no effort to represent with the greatest possible precision those o its appointed tests Such beliefs afforded a wide scope for the individual influence of the artist and the poet, and accordingly we find that they were yptian art But the Egyptians were accustoive a concrete form to all their ideas, that they were sure to clothe the plastic expression of this theme in a richness and brilliancy of colour which we do not find to the saree in any other people of antiquity On the other hand, although they did not escape the operation of the eternal law of change, their teive to each of their creations a peculiar fixity and consistency Their _Hades_, if we may call it so, took on a very definite for course of centuries; and this forreat Theban kings and in so to private individuals
[Illustration: FIG 185--Anubis, in a funerary pavilion; froypte_, i, pl 74)]
It was through long and glooalleries, like those of the s?????, that the perilous voyage of the soul had to be undertaken A boat carried it over the subterranean river, for in a country which had the Nile for its principal highway, every journey, even that of the sun through space, was looked upon as a navigation spacious saloons were ialleries, chambers where the infernal Gods and their acolytes sat enthroned in all the es of the to or square cha rock On either side of the audience chaination placed narrow passes and defiles, in which the walls seeress; tortuous corridors and glooulfs were fixed in these defiles, in which the terrible eance held themselves in ambush, prepared to harass the htful tortures those against whom sentence had already been pronounced The toaping depths and thecorridors To co more was required than to paint and chisel upon the walls the figures of those Gods, genii, and ions below On one side the pious king may be seen, escorted by Amen-Ra and the other divinities who to plead his cause before Osiris; on the other, the punishive _eclat_ to the royal apotheosis by the contrasts which it affords
Thus the toyptian solution of the problem which has always exercised mankind Their subterranean corridors were a reproduction upon a s characteristics of the under world, and we should coreat mistake e to look upon the series of pictures which decorate its walls asfrom a desire for luxury and display
Between the ideal yptians established one of those mutual confusions which have always been readily accepted by the faithful Nothing seeyptian, or to the Ethiopian as his pupil, than to ascribe the power of speech and es of the Gods, even when they had painted or carved theenious collation of various texts[258]
The chisel which created such tangible deities gave the more than the appearance of life Each God exercised his own proper function in that toions of the other world His gestures and the written formulae which appeared beside hi power To represent the king in his act of self-justification before Osiris was in some measure to anticipate that justification The reality and the iled in the mind of the believer that he was unable to separate one from the other
[258] _Recueil de Travaux_, vol i pp 155-159
Did the royal tombs contain statues of the defunct? None have been found in any of those already opened, and yet there is a chamber in the tomb of Rameses IV which appears from its inscriptions to have been called the _Statue chahbourhood is reserved for the funerary statuettes The tombs of private individuals contained statues; why then should none have been put in those of the sovereigns? The commemorative sanctuary, the external funerary tee often repeated, which in order that it nificence of its surroundings, and should have a better chance of duration, was colossal in its proportions In the inclosures of the temples of the two Rameses and upon the site of the Aures are to be counted by dozens, ranite froh, and some, with their pedestals, are as much as from 55 to more than 60 feet The two colossi of Amenophis III, the Pharaoh whoht Flayed, antic statues are still in place They should be seen in autumn and fro masses above the inundated plain, when their size and the simplicity of their lines will have an effect upon the traveller which he will never forget (Fig 20, and Plate vi)
In the royal tombs at Thebes, as in those at Memphis, the approach to the mummy-chamber is not by a well, but by an inclined plane The only wells which have been discovered in the tombs of the Bab-el-Molouk are, if we eniously contrived to throw any would-be violator off the right scent We have alreadyin the tomb of Seti In the pyramids the corridor which leads to theplane, but in the Theban to descent the enerally a very siranite, which has hitherto, in every instance, been found eus-chamber was closed by a door or not It is known that tombs were sometimes thus closed; some of the doors have been found in place,[259] and in a few of the texts e of one has yet been discovered in the royal sepulchres at Thebes ”All the doorways have sills and grooved jaes or of the leaves of a door itself have been found”[261] It is possible that they were never put in place The exact and accurate spirit which yptian artists would lead the of a door at the entrance to each chamber; but at the same time it is obvious that a few panels of sycaress of any one who should attempt to violate the royal sepulchre This latter considerationtime and trouble upon a futile precaution
[259] One was found in a Theban tomb opened by RHIND (_Thebes_, &c, pp 94 and 95) In the tonized traces of a door were found (BaeDEKER, _Unter-aegypten_, p 405); nothing but a new door was required to put the opening in its ancient state
[260] See one of the great inscriptions at Beni-Hassan, interpreted by M MASPERO (_Recueil_, etc vol i p 168)
[261] _Description de l'egypte_, (_Antiquites_, vol iii p
35)
These toreatly in size from reasons similar to those which deterth of reign enjoyed by their respective makers Cheops, Chephren, and Mycerinus continually added to the height and mass of their tombs until death put an end to the work In the same way, Seti and Raalleries in the Bab-el-Molouk As these galleries were ation was caused, no doubt, by the desire to develop to the utmost possible extent those pictures which were to be so powerful for good over the fortunes of the defunct in the under world
Apart froive us larger and more beautiful tombs than those which were obscure and reat Theban dynasties included several of those monarchs who have been called the Louis the Fourteenths and the Napoleons of Egypt,[262] and it was but natural that they should employ the crowd of artificers and artists which their enterprises gathered about them, for the excavation and decoration of their own tombs Either for this reason or for so and king in the matter of their tombs Even e admit that a certain number of royal sepulchres have so far escaped discovery, it is difficult to find place for all the sovereigns of the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties in the two _Valleys of the Kings_ Many things lead us to believe that several of those princes were content with very simple tombs; some of them may have been merely buried in the sand Thus Mariette discovered, at _Drah-Abou'l-Neggah_, the mummy of Queen Aah-hotep, of the nineteenth dynasty, some few feet beneath the surface The mummy chamber consisted of a few ill-adjusted stone slabs Like other mummies found on the same place, it seemed never to have been disturbed since it had been placed beneath the soil It was gilt all over, and was decorated with jehich now form some of the most priceless treasures of the Boulak Museuypt a petites journees_, p 104
The private tombs in the Theban necropolis, which are s, do not, like the latter, belong to a single period in the national history Thethem date back to the eleventh dynasty There are some also of the Sait period, and a few contemporary with the Ptolereater nu to that epoch which saw Thebes promoted to be the capital of the whole country, to the centuries, namely, between Amosis, the conqueror of the Hyksos, and the last of the Ramessides